Блейз Клемент - Duplicity Dogged Тhe Dachshund

Denton turned right, bouncing down a sandy road and whipping a high cloud of white dust. I pulled to the side of the road and watched the dust. After about half a mile, the dust cloud stopped, and the black dot that was Denton’s Land Rover emerged, going slowly toward a group of frame buildings set far back on the left side of the road. He had reached his destination.

I moved forward, turning at a snail’s pace to keep from exciting the dust. Wide ditches lay on each side of the narrow road. On the right was a wilderness of pine, oak, palmetto, and palm above a morass of saw palmetto, wax myrtle, gallberry, fetterbush, and staggerbush teeming with deer and wild hogs. Ospreys perched in the trees, and a red-shouldered hawk watched my passage from the top of a runner oak. On the left, a barbed-wire fence enclosed thick yellow cordgrass, tall as a man. The grass hid the house where Denton and Leo Brossi had taken Reggie. I prayed it hid me too.

27

Well back from the driveway leading to the house, I pulled to the side of the road and got out of the Bronco. I managed to bound across the ditch without getting bitten by any critters hiding in its vines and grasses, and balanced on the ditch’s edge while I pushed down the lowest string of barbed wire. Gingerly, I stretched my leg over it, whispering ouches and shits when sharp barbs punctured my flesh. At least I managed to crawl through without snagging my shirt or my hair on the top wire.

I crouched low and began swimming through the cordgrass, parting it with outstretched arms, praying I didn’t step on a snake. Swarms of gnats and mosquitoes rose like steam, and a fine mist of pollen covered me from the grass heads. I felt a sneeze coming on and pinched my nose. The sneeze imploded inside my head, causing lightning flashes across my cortex.

Something sticky brushed my bare shoulder. I instinctively slapped it away and then gave an involuntary shriek when I saw it was a furry tarantula. The thing scurried away into the grass, while I rubbed my skin and remembered all the stories I’d heard as a child about how a tarantula’s bite will cause your flesh to rot away and leave a big cavity down to your bones. I couldn’t see a bite mark, but for all I knew a tarantula’s bite might be invisible. Shuddering, I moved on, wanting to get to the end of this teeming field.

I could hear men’s voices now, and a heavy laugh floated over the grass. I couldn’t see anything except the pale grass stems, but I didn’t dare stand up. All I could do was press on, hoping my movement through the sea of grass wasn’t an obvious trail the men were watching. With luck, I would come out behind one of the sheds. If I weren’t lucky, death might be waiting for me on the other side of this ocean of grass. Oddly enough, it wasn’t death that I feared, but turning coward and running away without saving Reggie.

After what seemed an eternity, I got close enough to the end of the field of cordgrass to see a dilapidated shed directly in front of me, one of a number of similar buildings scattered behind and to the side of a battered old house. A wall of stacked lumber stood at the end of the driveway, with logs piled higher than my head. Gabe either sold wood to people nostalgic for fires roaring inside while snow fell outside, or he just kept trim by felling trees and chopping logs. Several snakeskins hung with their top ends nailed to logs in the stack, and a long alligator hide was stretched on a plywood board raised on sawhorses.

The front yard was littered with abandoned furniture, parts of cars that had been there so long that grass grew on them, and rusted pieces of farm equipment. On the far side of the sandy driveway, the weathered frame house had a sagging front porch and a pile of garbage beside the porch steps. Not a compost heap, just a pile of garbage. Eggshells and egg cartons, plastic milk bottles and bread wrappers and greasy KFC boxes, all rotting and stinking in the glaring heat and probably being aerated by roaches the size of small mice. The garbage pile made Gabe seem even more dangerous. He really was as dumb and primitive as he looked, and a violent nature in a stupid man makes a lethal combination.

Gabe himself was apparently having some kind of standoff with Denton and Leo. They were below him next to the car, while Gabe stood on the porch with his hammy arms folded over his chest and his chin defiantly tilted to show he didn’t defer to any man. Anybody looking at the three men would immediately have known they came from different worlds. Denton was dressed like a lawyer, dark trousers, white dress shirt with the sleeves rolled partway up his arms. Leo looked like the pimp he had been. A foot shorter than Denton, his pinkish beige pants were too tight and too shiny, and an expensive palm-printed silk shirt still managed to look cheap on him. Gabe wore a dark mesh muscle shirt that emphasized his defined chest, and stained jeans that hugged thighs thick as tree trunks. He stood with legs spread, feet firmly planted in knee-high leather boots. I didn’t have to be any closer to know he smelled like the garbage heap below him.

Denton was speaking in a measured monotone, as if he wanted something and was being careful not to rile Gabe in the asking. He pointed toward his Land Rover, where Reggie was standing in the backseat looking out the side window. Then he raised his hands in a gesture of being at his wit’s end, as if he didn’t know what he would do if Gabe didn’t do whatever he was asking.

Gabe gave him a scornful look, dumb rube showing contempt for the helplessness of the city slicker, and unfolded his arms.

“This is the last time! I’m not doing it again!”

He came down the steps, walking with the swaggering strut peculiar to men of small minds and large egos, and Denton permitted himself a quick smile of victory. He had manipulated Gabe, and it didn’t look as if it were the first time.

Denton opened the car door and Reggie backed away, whining and uncertain. Denton reached in and grabbed Reggie’s leash and jerked him out, while Gabe turned and walked toward the small shed in front of me. I heard the door open, and I imagined sharp hoes and scythes and all kinds of toxic and poisonous farm supplies that would be harmful to a dog. Reggie must have had the same idea, because he struggled and fought, but Denton had him on a choke chain that finally brought him across the driveway to the shed.

Denton said, “Get in there, dammit!”

A moment later the door slammed shut, and I heard a wooden latch drop into place.

At least Reggie was alive. Still muzzled, he was stuck in a good dog’s dilemma. Denton had been a guest in Reggie’s home, which put him in the category of humans to whom he was supposed to show submission. But Reggie was a smart dog, and I had the feeling that Denton had pushed him beyond his limit.

Leo Brossi’s voice carried well enough for me to hear him ask Gabe a question that made my heart clatter.

“How long will it take you to load the darts?”

Gabe said something that was lost, and the three men went inside the house.

As soon as the front door closed behind them, I hunkered over and began moving through the tall grass toward the shed. All the windows on this side of the house had opaque window shades pulled halfway down. To see me, a person would have to raise a shade or stoop to look under it. They could also see me if they were sitting in a chair where they would be at the level of the lower part of the window, but I didn’t want to think about that.

I also didn’t want to think about how Gabe was loading a dart gun with a deadly poison that would paralyze Reggie within seconds. He would die a horrible death, fully conscious and unable to move.

Getting as close to the edge of the screening cordgrass as I could, I told myself Go! and ran like hell around the shed to the door. As I’d expected, it had a simple wooden latch high above my head. I stood on tiptoe and stretched my arm as high as it would go. As I did, I spoke low to Reggie.